Immigrant Characters in Spanish Audiovisual Broadcast on Platforms

Abstract

Recently, society has been debating the representation of immigrants in the media and how it might affect possible racist behavior in everyday life. This study responds to the need for a better understanding of the representation of immigrants in fiction programs broadcast on platforms, and the shortage of studies that have analyzed fiction broadcast via video-on-demand because of it being such a recent phenomenon. Content analysis was conducted of 749 characters that appeared in 38 Spanish-produced programs. We observed that immigrant characters are not underrepresented, although there are statistically significant differences in terms of nationality, origin, and ethnicity. This suggests that it is not origin that conditions the role of immigrant characters, but skin color and place of birth. Moreover, there continues to be a perverse association between immigrant characters and the use of violence or drugs, thus maintaining the stereotype that links nationality with criminal behavior and substance abuse.